The broad cultural impulse toward "minority"
enfranchisement and inclusion that produced the civil rights movement in
the 1960s and the feminist movement in the 1970s led as well to the
disability rights movement -- expressed by the Americans with
Disabilities Act of 1990, the most comprehensive civil rights bill yet
for people with disabilities. This landmark law requires both the public
and private sectors to accommodate the corporeal and functional
differences we think of as disabilities.

As disability has been recast as a civil rights issue, the emergent
academic discipline of Disability Studies also has refrained the concept
of disability by placing it in a social context -- what is called an
ethnicity model -- showing that the social problems and judgments of
inferiority that disabled people face are produced by their interaction
with a cultural environment, both material and psychological, that is at
odds either with the functioning or the configuration of their bodies.
Disability Studies views the condition of having a disability as a
social relationship characterized by discrimination and oppression
rather than as a personal misfortune or individual inadequacy.

Disability Studies originally arose in the academy from Sociology
and has developed more recently in the Humanities where it is an area of
critical inquiry that is parallel to, informed by, and overlapping with
Feminist Studies. In its broadest sense, Disability Studies in the
Humanities undertakes a radical critique of disability. The fundamental
premise of Disability Studies is that disability is a culturally
fabricated narrative of the body, a system that produces subjects by
differentiating and marking bodies.

This comparison of bodies legitimates the distribution of
resources, status, and power within a biased social and architectural
environment. As such, disability has four aspects: first, it is a system
for interpreting bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between
bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that
produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; and fourth, it is a way
of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self.

Disability is a broad term within which cluster ideological
categories as varied as sick, deformed, ugly, old, maimed, afflicted,
abnormal, or debilitated -- all of which disadvantage people by
devaluing bodies that do not conform to certain cultural standards.
Thus, disability functions to preserve and validate such privileged
designations as beautiful, healthy, normal, fit, competent, intelligent
-- all of which provide cultural capital to those who can claim such
status and reside within these social identities. It is, then, the
various interactions between bodies and world that create disability
from the raw material of human variation and precariousness.

Disability demands a reckoning with the messiness of bodily
variety, with literal individuation run amok. Because disability is
defined not as a set of observable, broadly predictable traits, such as
femaleness or skin color, but rather as any departure from the physical,
mental, and psychological norms and expectations of a particular
culture, disability highlights individual differences. In short, the
concept of disability unites a heterogeneous group of people whose only
commonality is being considered abnormal. As the norm becomes neutral in
an environment created to accommodate it, disability becomes intense,
extravagant, and problematic.

Disability, then, is the unorthodox made flesh, refusing to be
normalized, neutralized, or homogenized. More important, in an era
governed by the abstract principle of universal equality, disability
signals that the body cannot be universalized. Shaped by history,
defined by particularity, and at odds with its environment, disability
confounds any notion of a generalizable, stable physical state of being.
The cripple before the stairs, the blind person before the printed page,
the deaf person before the radio, the amputee before the typewriter, and
the dwarf before the counter are all proof that the myriad structures
and practices of material, daily life enforce the cultural standard of a
universal human being with a narrow range of bodily and mental
variation.

We need to study disability in the context of what we take to be
the body of knowledge that tells the story of our world and lives -- the
Humanities. This study is essential not to make students and teachers
feel more comfortable in their skins, but rather to direct the
formidable critical skills of higher education toward reimagining
disability, seeing it with fresh eyes and in new ways. This is an
important educational goal not only for people with disabilities, but
for everyone.

The constituency for Disability Studies is all of us -- as
disability is the most human of experiences, touching every family and
potentially touching us all. This universality of disability experience
is reflected in the term "temporarily able-bodied" (TAB),
which serves as a reality check to those who perceive themselves to be
immutably able-bodied.

FEMINIST STUDIES:

In the 30 years during which feminism has been a part of the
academic conversation, it has proved to be flexible, diffuse, and --
perhaps most significantly -- self-critical. Thus, we speak now of
"feminisms," "conflicts in feminism,"
"hyphenated feminisms," and even "post-feminism."
(1) Historically, academic feminism combines the highly political civil
rights and accompanying identity politics impulses of the 1960s and
1970s with postructuralism's theoretical critique of the liberal
humanist faith in knowledge, truth, and identity -- often adding an
insistence on materiality gleaned from Marxist thought. The focus of
feminist conversation has shifted from early debates between liberal and
radical feminisms, which focused on achieving equality, to later
formulations of cultural and gynocentric feminisms, which highlighted
and rehabilitated female differences. (2)

Most recently, the debate between those who would minimize
differences to achieve equality and those who would elaborate
differences to celebrate the feminine has been eclipsed by an
investigation of how the gender system itself operates and by its
profound challenge to the very notion of "woman" as any kind
of unified identity category or sociopolitical group. (3) By
complicating the shared identity "woman" and recognizing that
all women have multiple identities, academic feminism has generated an
array of critical areas of study -- Black Feminist Studies, Lesbian
Studies, Latina Studies, and so on -- each an acknowledgement that every
woman is never simply a "woman," but is multiply identified
across a spectrum of cultural categories, many of which are extrapolated
from human physical differences. (4)

Most of these areas of study within feminism arise from conflicts
between overarching feminist assumptions of the universality of
women's experience and the experience or perspectives of women who
are members of other oppressed or stigmatized groups, in addition to
being female. The points of view underpinning these diverse feminist
analyses take issue with a homogeneous category of women and focus on
the essential effort to understand just how multiple identities
intersect.

Both inside and outside the academy in 2001, feminism is still
struggling to articulate both theory and practice that adequately
address cultural and corporeal differences among women. In its effort to
highlight gender, feminism has sometimes obscured other identities and
categories of cultural analysis - such as race, ethnicity, sexuality,
class, and physical ability. As feminism recognizes this omission,
however, the voices of and for women with disabilities are beginning to
be heard across the Humanities.

The strands of feminist thought most applicable to Disability
Studies are those that go beyond a narrow focus on gender alone to
undertake a broad sociopolitical critique of systemic, inequitable power
relations based on social categories grounded in the body. Feminism
becomes a theoretical perspective and methodology for examining gender
as an ideological and material category that interacts with but does not
subordinate other social identities or the particularities of
embodiment, history, and location that informs personhood. Briefly put,
feminism's often conflicting and always complex aims of
politicizing the materiality of bodies and rewriting the category of
woman combine exactly the methods that should be used to examine
disability.

FEMINIST DISABILITY STUDIES

Feminism and Disability Studies converge in Feminist Disability
Studies. Just as Women's Studies expands the lexicon of what we
imagine as womanly and seeks to understand and destigmatize the identity
"woman," so has Disability Studies examined the identity
"disability" in the service of integrating disabled people
more fully into our society.

Feminist Disability Studies brings the two together to argue that
cultural expectations, received attitudes, social institutions, and
their attendant material conditions create a situation in which bodies
that are categorized as both female and disabled are disadvantaged
doubly and in parallel ways. Feminist Disability Studies interprets
disability as a cultural rather than an individual or medical issue and
insists on examining power relations rather than assigning deviance when
analyzing cultural representations of oppressed groups.

Feminist Disability Studies emphasizes changing public policy and
cultural institutions rather than viewing the problems of disabled women
as residing in their own supposedly inferior bodies. Within the critical
framework of Feminist Disability Studies, disability becomes a
representational system rather than a medical problem, a social
construction instead of a personal misfortune or bodily flaw, and a
subject appropriate for wide-ranging intellectual inquiry rather than a
specialized field within medicine, rehabilitation, or social work.

Feminist Disability Studies also seeks to augment and correct
traditional feminism, which sometimes ignores, misrepresents, or
conflicts with the concerns of women with disabilities. For example,
disabled women must sometimes defend against the assessment of their
bodies as unfit for motherhood or of themselves as childlike objects who
occasion other people's virtue. Whereas motherhood is often seen as
compulsory for women and therefore potentially oppressive, the opposite
is true for disabled women, who are denied or discouraged from this
reproductive role. Perhaps more problematic still, the pro-choice
rationale for abortion rights seldom questions the assumption that
"defective" fetuses, destined to become disabled people,
should be eliminated. (5)

The controversial feminist ethic of care also has been criticized
by feminist disability scholars for undermining symmetrical, reciprocal
relations among disabled and nondisabled women as well as for suggesting
that care is the sole responsibility of women. Making disabled women the
objects of care risks casting them as helpless in order to celebrate
nurturing as virtuous feminine agency. Philosopher Anita Silvers
explains that "far from vanquishing patriarchal systems,
substituting the ethics of caring for the ethics of equality threatens
an even more oppressive paternalism."(6)

One of the most pervasive feminist assumptions that undermines some
disabled women's struggle is the liberal ideology of autonomy and
independence that fuels the broader impulse toward women's
empowerment. By tacitly incorporating the liberal premise that levels
individual characteristics to posit an abstract, disembodied subject of
democracy, feminist practice often leaves no space for the needs and
accommodations that disabled women's bodies require. (7) Prominent
disability rights and feminist activist Judy Heumann's angry and
disappointed words reflect the alienation that results: "When I
come into a room full of feminists, all they see is a wheelchair."

ASPECTS OF FEMINIST DISABILITY STUDIES:

The major work of Feminist Disability Studies is to undertake a
complex critique of gender and disability as intertwined exclusionary
and oppressive systems rather than as the natural and appropriate order
of things. The fundamental premises of feminist disability critical
theory are: that representation structures reality; that the margins
define the center; that gender and disability are ways of signifying
relationships of power; that human identity is multiple and unstable;
and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications.
Feminist Disability Studies can be divided into four aspects, in which
these premises operate: representation, the body, identity, and
activism.

Representation: Feminist Disability Studies probes the issue of
representation in its broadest sense to understand the saturating of the
material world with meaning. Indeed, human language itself, which
enables thought and knowledge, is representation. In this sense,
disability and gender are stories we tell about bodies and are our
systematic ways of representing bodies. Disability and gender are
representations that historians can chart over time, interpretations
that philosophers can query, images that religious scholars can trace,
concepts that geographers can probe, traditions that rhetoricians can
contest, and fictions that literary critics can reveal.

Cultural stories about women and disability go back to the
beginnings of western civilization. Classical thought has long defined
women and disabled people as being the same. For example, Aristotle
defined women as "mutilated males," thus suggesting that women
be seen as disabled men. Indeed, Aristotle describes women in exactly
the same terms we now use to describe disability; femaleness is "a
departure from type" and women have "improper form." We
are, in a word, "monstrosit[ies]."(8) According to this view,
women are literally the first freaks or what Nancy Tuana calls
"misbegotten men." (9) The tradition that Aristotle initiated
envisions women as what we might now call "congenitally
deformed" as a result of their "genetic disability."

The feminist investigation of gender since Simone de
Beauvoir's landmark 1949 study, The Second Sex, reveals how women
are assigned a cluster of ascriptions, such as Aristotle's, that
mark us as the "Other."

What is less widely recognized, however, is that this collection of
interrelated characterizations is precisely the same as is attributed to
people with disabilities.

Many parallels exist between the social meanings attributed to
female bodies and those assigned to disabled bodies. Both are cast as
deviant and inferior; both are excluded from full participation in
public as well as economic life; both are defined in opposition to a
norm that is assumed to possess natural physical superiority.

Indeed, equating femaleness with disability is common, sometimes to
denigrate women and sometimes to defend them. Examples abound: Freud
delineated femaleness in terms of castration; late 19th century
physicians defined menstruation as a disabling and restricting
"eternal wound"; Thorstein Veblen described women in 1899 as
being literally disabled by feminine roles and costuming. And 20th
century feminists invoke negative images of disability to describe the
oppression of women; for example, Jane Flax asserts that women are
"mutilated and deformed" by sexist ideology and practices.
(10)

This persistent intertwining of disability with femaleness in the
western tradition provides a starting point for Feminist Disability
Studies, as bodily functioning and configuration anchor the way western
tradition defines both femaleness and disability. Most fundamentally,
both women and disabled people are imagined as being pure body,
unredeemed by mind or spirit. Women are cast as tethered to materiality,
to "immanence," in Simone de Beauvior's analysis. (11)
Moreover, this sentence of embodiment is conceived as either a lack or
an excess. Women, for example, are imagined as castrated or
"penis-poor" in Marge Piercy's wonderful term. (12) They
are hysterical or have overactive hormones.

Women have been imagined as alternately having insatiable appetite
in some eras and as pathologically self-denying in other times.
Similarly, disabled people are portrayed as having extra chromosomes or
limb deficiencies. The differences of disability are cast as atrophy,
meaning degeneration, or as hypertrophy, meaning enlargement. Women with
abundant body hair are described as having hypertrichosis. People with
disabilities have aplasia, meaning absence or failure of formation, or
hypoplasia, meaning underdevelopment. What Susan Bordo calls the
"too-muchness" of women also makes disabled people equally
threatening in the cultural resonances we give to differences. (13)
Think of the excess embodied in the figure of the monster, the witch or
the madwoman -- all enduring cultural images of disability and often in
its female form.

Each of these perspectives measures women and disabled people
against a normative standard body and finds them wanting. Either they
are not enough, or they are too much. Whether cast as superfluous or
inadequate, women and disabled people are always wrong. Theirs are
supposedly the ungovernable, helpless, dependent, weak, vulnerable, and
incapable bodies. This cultural narrative merges the female body and the
disabled body and produces an ideology that renders women and disabled
people both redundant and expendable. Thus, they are the objects of
female infanticide, selective abortion, eugenic programs, assisted
suicide, bride burning, honor killings, domestic violence, and the
classical practice of exposing disabled infants to die.

Another aspect of this condemnation to materiality that defines
women and disabled people is their role as spectacles. Women are the
proper object of the male gaze, while disabled people are the proper
object of the stare. (14) Beauty contests, girlie shows, freak shows,
telethons, and medical theater all testify to an appropriating
to-be-looked-atness that supposedly inheres in the female and or the
disabled body. Leering at women and gawking at disabled people are
historical practices that constitute female and disabled personhood in
the social world.

All these social scripts, these systems of representation, these
collective cultural stories about disability and femaleness shape the
material world, inform human relations, and mold our senses of who we
are. For example, the voice that rings through the head of Virginia
Woolf's famous character, Lilly Brisco, in To the Lighthouse,
insists that: "Women can't paint; women can't
write." (15) Think of what the concept of "throwing like a
girl" tells us about how women learn that their bodies are objects
not actors in the world. (16) Consider the racialism and stigma embedded
in a term such as "mongoloid idiot." (17) Look at what Harlan
Hahn calls the pervasive "asexual objectification" of disabled
people, the assumption that they are sexless or are inappropriate sexual
partners. (18) These stereotypical, often unexamined stories ultimately
undergird exclusionary environments, economic discrimination,
sociopolitical marginalization, and violence.

Feminist Disability Studies has challenged these tired but
persistent narratives by focusing on gender and disability as
representational systems, as ways of giving meaning to human variations.
From the earliest "images of surveys to the most nuanced
poststructuralist critiques of identity, perhaps the most fundamental
goal of Feminist Disability Studies is to reimagine women and people
with disabilities. All the tools of critical theory are being recruited
to show that gender and disability are discourses to be charted over
time, aesthetic motifs to be probed, rhetorical traditions to be
contested, metaphors to be deconstructed, performances to be analyzed,
and fictions to be revealed.

The Body: A second aspect of Feminist Disability Studies is its
focus on the body. While confronting issues of representation is
certainly crucial to Feminist Disability Studies' cultural
critique, the field does not focus exclusively on that issue. In fact,
what distinguishes both Feminist Studies and Disability Studies from
many other academic critical paradigms is that both scrutinize a wide
range of material practices involving the lived body.

Perhaps because women and disabled people so often are closely
associated with the body in western thought, their actual bodies have
been subjected relentlessly to what Michel Foucault calls
"disciplining." (l9) In other words, tremendous social
pressures enforce practices that shape and regulate both female bodies
and disabled bodies. The many practices directed at making female and
disabled bodies conform to cultural expectations fall into two broad
interrelated and ideologically loaded categories: medicine and
appearance.

The Politics of Medicalization: Feminist Disability Studies
undertakes a wide-ranging critique of the medicalization of female and
disabled bodies as both women and disabled people have been imagined as
medically abnormal-as the quintessential sick ones-which has entailed
distinct consequences in everything from epidemiology and diagnosis to
prophylaxis and therapeutics.

The goal of medicine has been to cure, fix, eliminate, or control
these ostensibly deviant bodies. This ideology of cure is not isolated
in medical texts or charity campaigns but in fact permeates cultural
attitudes and practices about disability.

Women have endured clitoridectomies, ovariotomies, unnecessary
hysterectomies, radical mastectomies, and drugs to regulate their
supposedly deviant sexualities and personalities. Disabled people as
well are routinely subjected to invasive surgical procedures and
medication intended not to improve their lives, but rather to
standardize their bodies and eliminate any physical differences from
ostensibly normal people.

Research on women's health has been inadequate or brutal, just
as funding to enhance the economic status of disabled people is always
outstripped by investments in medical procedures to normalize disabled
bodies. Both women and disabled people have been institutionalized,
forcibly sterilized, euthanized, mutilated, and literally reshaped in
the name of "their own good." (20)

Congenitally disabled people are particularly objects of these
normalizing procedures. Two examples of this will-to-correct the
disabled body are the treatment of conjoined twins and the treatment of
intersexed individuals, better known as hermaphrodites, who display
ambiguous genitalia and gender characteristics. Both of these forms of
embodiment are congenital variations that spectacularly violate sacred
ideologies of western culture. Conjoined twins contradict our notion of
the individual as discrete and autonomous - actually, quite similarly to
the way pregnancy does. (21) Intersexed infants challenge our insistence
that biological gender is unequivocal. (22)

So threatening to the order of things is the natural embodiment of
conjoined twins and intersexed people that they are almost always
surgically normalized through amputation and mutilation. So intolerable
is their insult to the dominant ideologies that the testimonies of
adults with these forms of embodiment who say that they are happy the
way they are is routinely ignored in establishing the rationale for
medical treatment.

Feminist Disability Studies focuses as well on several other
aspects of embodiment. A disability perspective on such reproductive
issues as genetic testing and selective abortion complicates much of the
feminist rhetoric about these practices. (23) Some disability activists
argue that the "choices to abort fetuses with disabilities is a
coercive form of genocide against the disabled. Similarly, genetic
testing and such enterprises as the Human Genome Project are often
critiqued as enactments of eugenic ideology, what Evelyn Fox Keller calls a "eugenics of normalcy." (24) Aging is also at once a
women's issue and a disability issue, since a significant majority
of elderly people are disabled women. (25) Depression, anorexia, and
agoraphobia are psycho-physical disabilities that are linked to gender
roles. (26)

In addition, the politics of prosthetics, a disability concern,
enters the purview of women's studies when we consider the
controversial use of breast implants and prostheses for breast cancer
survivors or other cosmetic prostheses such as corsets. (27) Obesity is
a disability that qualified women to be freak show performers in the
19th and early 20th centuries; to quote Susie Orbach - "fat is a
feminist issue." (28) Indeed, the tyranny of slenderness is perhaps
the most virulent of the ideologies of beauty used to discipline and
control the female body.

The Politics of Appearance: Given that the medicalization of female
and disabled bodies is very often employed in the service of the
politics of appearance, beauty is a value system that Feminist
Disability Studies examines and critiques. We have been taught to assume
rather uncritically that beauty is a relatively fixed property of the
female body, even though most of us recognize the historical and
cultural relativity of appearance standards. Beauty has been
traditionally framed as an aesthetic quality, whether universal or
subjective, and imagined as free from political implications or
relations of power.

While many are willing to challenge impossible beauty norms, most
still tend to think of beauty in terms of personal adequacy or
inadequacy. Beauty, we have learned from our culture, is something
corporeal that one has or does not have - just like a disability. But
whereas having a disability seems a disadvantage, having beauty seems an
advantage.

Feminist Disability Studies shifts our received assumptions about
beauty by suggesting that beauty has a political dimension. Social
discrimination and political subordination are linked to the cultural
valuing and devaluing of bodies on the basis of their appearance.
Focusing on appearance enables us to critique not only the system of
standards called beauty, but also to consider how appearance norms
contribute to sexism, racism, ableism and other forms of social
oppression. Beauty, then, can be seen in this way as a coercive cultural
ideology, a set of values and practices that, like disability, has
consequences in the material world.

Lynn S. Chancer asserts that the ideology of beauty produces what
she calls, not without irony, "looks-ism," which she defines
as "a discriminatory phenomenon [that] sets up categorical
divisions, placing far greater importance for one sex than the other on
the cultivation and maintenance of particular bodily appearances to gain
love, status, and recognition." Moreover, she continues, these
"beauty expectations are systemic"; that is, they are a
"social fact," to use Emile Durkheim's term for an aspect
of culture that "exist[s] above and beyond the ability of
individuals to control." (29)

Like disability, beauty is a system of representations, a set of
practices and meanings, and an historically shifting ideology of the
female body that we receive upon entering the world. As such, it is a
way of looking at, thinking about, and interpreting bodies that is at
once culturally determined and yet by no means unalterable.

Feminist Disability Studies "denaturalizes" beauty and
normalcy to transcend the usual way of thinking about these value
systems -- as an aesthetic quality of bodies. Feminist Disability
Studies moves us from thinking about bodies as naturally having certain
meanings to seeing them as social products that are informed by our
cultural interpretations of them. Feminist Disability Studies shows that
beauty and normalcy are a series of practices and positions that women
take in order to avoid the stigmatization of ugliness and abnormality.

Appearance norms have a long history in western culture. While the
classical ideal was designed to be worshipped rather than imitated, the
notion of an ideal has migrated to become the standard which we are
expected to achieve. The ideological systems called beauty and
disability both posit a certain kind of body, a malleable body that can
in some sense assume any identity or form that it chooses. This fantasy
of the malleable body conforms to modernity's notion that the body
is a neutral instrument of the omnipotent individual will, an instrument
of agency that is both pliable and invulnerable, that we can control and
alter. This notion is manifested today in the institution of cosmetic
and reconstructive surgery, as is the belief that the body is not only
imagined to be but literally is plastic, almost infinitely
transformable, not just in its actions or gestures, but in the very form
of its flesh. (30)

Such plasticity takes on moral dimensions in a society devoted to
the fantasy of self-improvement inflected by the duty to consume that is
characteristic of late capitalism. Think, for example, of the moral
injunction against fat that is so common today. (31) What is most
important for the politics of appearance that includes both beauty and
disability in its purview is that cultural practices shape bodies
according to a strict standard of normalcy that is not only privileged
but that also is framed as a moral imperative.

The particularities we call disability, race, and ethnicity
generally resist this coercive standardization more stubbornly than the
bodies we imagine as being nondisabled, white, or beautiful. They often
are not so plastic or require more invasive or extreme standardization
procedures. Moreover, postmodern culture draws a line between what it
posits as fitness or cosmetic disciplinary procedures, which it often
challenges, and the normalizing procedures it imposes upon impaired
bodies under the almost never questioned ideological banners of health,
reconstruction, or rehabilitation.

Cosmetic surgery, which is used overwhelmingly to standardize
women's bodies, now enforces feminine beauty standards.
Reconstructive surgery, which is used exclusively to eliminate
disability, enforces the standards of normalcy. Both procedures
commodify the body and are presented as enhancements that correct flaws
or improve the psychological well being of the patient.

The twin ideologies of normalcy and beauty posit female and
disabled bodies both as spectacles to be looked at and as plastic bodies
to be shaped infinitely to conform to a set of standards called
"normal" and "beautiful." In the language of
cosmetic surgery, for example, the unreconstructed female body is
persistently cast as having "abnormalities" that can be
"corrected" by surgical procedures which "improve"
appearance by producing "natural looking" noses, thighs,
breasts, chins, and so on. Thus, women's and disabled people's
unmodified bodies are presented as unnatural and abnormal while the
surgically altered bodies are portrayed as normal and natural.

Beauty ideology, and with it normalcy, has become more coercive
over the last 25 years. Ironically, this rising concern with beauty has
occurred exactly at the same time as the legal and social changes
wrought by feminism. This escalation can be documented by the dramatic
increase in the occurrence and reporting of eating disorders and the
recent burgeoning commercialization of beauty practices such as dieting
(a $33 billion a year industry), cosmetics (a $20 billion a year
industry), and cosmetic surgery ($33 million and growing, with nine
times more women than men as clients). Naomi Wolf has convincingly shown
that the social demand to configure our bodies according to
beauty's standards and to create its effects with commercial
products has escalated dramatically in the 20th century, not only as
capitalism has demanded expanded markets for beauty products but, more
interestingly, as women have achieved political gains and more equality.

Now that women have access to the vote, education, employment
opportunities, and legal freedoms, Wolf argues, beauty has come to be
the last restrictive institution and has consequently had to take over
the repressive work that an entire system of restraining institutions
accomplished in the 19th century and before. (32) While women have been
liberated from many restrictions, they have not been freed from the
social mandate to pursue beauty.

Feminist Disability Studies does not suggest that women and
disabled people should not use modern medicine to improve their lives or
help their bodies function more fully. Rather, it illuminates and
explains instead of enforcing set orthodoxy. Feminist Disability Studies
offers a counter logic to the powerful cultural mandates to be
normal/beautiful at any cost.

The ideology of beauty in the context of disability raises critical
issues that are complex and provocative. For example, questions about
gender, sexuality, and disability were raised by the photo spread of
Ellen Stohl, a paraplegic actress who appeared as the nude centerfold of
Playboy magazine in 1987. Stohl wrote to editor Hugh Hefner that she
chose to be in Playboy because "sexuality is the hardest thing for
disabled persons to hold onto." (33)

The 1990s version of Ellen Stohl is Aimee Mullins, a champion
runner, fashion model, celebrity, and double amputee -- who also was one
of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People of 1999. An icon of
disability pride and equality, Mullins exposes -- in fact calls
attention to -- the mark of her disability in most photos, refusing to
normalize or hide her disability in order to pass as nondisabled.
Indeed, her public version of her career is that her disability has been
a benefit -- she has several sets of legs, both cosmetic and functional,
and is able to choose how tall she wants to be. (34) This narrative of
advantage works against the traditional narrative of overcoming that is
usually ascribed to disabled people in the public sphere.

Identity: A third aspect of Feminist Disability Studies is an
inquiry into how identity operates in society. The most productive
challenge that feminist thought has faced is the challenge to the unity
of the category "woman," on which the entire feminist
enterprise seemed to rest. Recognizing that all women have multiple
identities compelled feminists to turn away from an exclusive
male/female focus.

Feminism began instead to look at the exclusionary, essentialist,
oppressive aspects of the category "woman" itself.

The kind of rigorous self-critique feminism has undertaken is at
once humbling and heartening. Expanding our understanding of how various
registers of identity such as gender, race, class, and sexuality intrude
upon and inflect one another sharpens feminist analyses and critiques.
Disability is, of course, one such identity category that complicates
the idea that all women are essentially alike and illuminates the
workings of gender in particular ways. Indeed, disability disrupts the
unity of the category "woman" and challenges the primacy of
gender.

As a category of analysis, disability poses invigorating questions
to feminism about issues such as power relations among women, the status
of the lived body, the privileges of being normal, the social
construction of the able-bodied, and the uses of identity politics. In
turn, gender complicates Disability Studies in equally productive ways
by introducing such concerns as power differentials within the
disability community, reproductive and sexuality differences, and the
ways that gender scripts inflect disabled identity.

For example, Feminist Disability Studies illuminates the ways that
identity categories operate and interact within a political and economic
context by looking at the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This
historic piece of civil rights legislation creates the legal category of
"the disabled" by broadly defining a person as disabled if she
has a condition that substantially limits a major life activity or -- in
a gesture toward a social model of disability -- is perceived as having
such a condition.

The courts, of course, are scurrying to limit and clarity this
definition on a case-by-case basis. Who is disabled and who is
able-bodied is being determined just as race was legally codified in the
19th century, although of course for different ends. Is one disabled,
for instance, if function is normalized by prostheses such as glasses,
hearing aids, or canes? Is one disabled by a facial deformity that makes
one "ugly" but does not affect functioning? What about
premenstrual syndrome, depression, HIV infection, infertility, aging,
chronic pain, fetal alcohol syndrome? Suddenly, "them" and
"us" are not so clear -- and gender is implicated throughout.

Feminist Disability Studies pressures both feminist theory and
Disability Studies to acknowledge physical diversity more thoroughly in
the task of exploring identity. Perhaps feminism's most useful
concept for Feminist Disability Studies is standpoint theory, which
recognizes the immediacy and complexity of physical existence.
Emphasizing the multiplicity of women's identities, histories, and
bodies, this theory asserts that individual situations structure the
subjectivity from which particular women speak and perceive. (35)

Incorporating postmodernism's challenge of the objective
Enlightenment viewpoint -- the supposed view from nowhere -- feminist
standpoint theory has reformulated gender identity as a complex, dynamic
matrix of interrelated, often contradictory, experiences, strategies,
styles, and attributions mediated by culture and individual history.
This matrix cannot be separated meaningfully into discrete entities or
ordered into a hierarchy.

Acknowledging identity's particular, complex nature allows
characteristics beyond race, class, and gender to emerge. Standpoint
theory, and the feminist practice of explicitly situating oneself when
speaking, allow for complicating inflections such as disability or, more
broadly, body configuration -- attributions such as fat, disfigured,
abnormal, ugly, or deformed -- to enter into our considerations of
identity and subjectivity. Such a dismantling of the unitary category
"woman" has enabled feminist theory to encompass, although not
without contention, such feminist specializations as, for example,
Patricia Hill Collins' "Black feminist thought" or my own
explorations of a "feminist disability studies." So just as
feminist theory can bring to disability theory strategies for analyzing
the meanings of physical differences and identifying sites where those
meanings influence other discourses, it can help articulate the
uniqueness and physicality of identity as well.

Feminist Disability Studies focuses on the singularity and perhaps
the immutability of the flesh, and at the same time questions the
identity it supports. For example, Nancy Mairs explores the politics of
self-naming, a common feminist theoretical practice, in regard to women
with disabilities. Mairs claims the appellation "cripple"
because it demands that others acknowledge the particularity of her
body. "People...wince at the word 'cripple'," Mairs
contends. Even though she retains what has been a derogatory term, she
insists on determining its significance herself: "Perhaps I want
them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom
the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal
truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger."

Mairs is not simply celebrating the term of otherness or attempting
to reverse its negative connotation; rather, she wants to call attention
to the material reality of her crippledness, to her bodily difference
and her experience of it. Mairs chooses here to define her identity in
terms of the significance of her pain and her struggle with an
environment built for other bodies. (36)

Activism: Feminist Disability Studies also focuses on activism for
change, which augments and remedies the accompanying focus on negative
representations of women and disabled people, the pathologizing of their
bodies, and the politics of appearance. Important activist strands have
developed in both feminism and Disability Studies that shift them from
the constant task of exposing just how relentless and pervasive
oppression has been -- and is.

This is a different kind of activism from demonstrations and
marches. While less theatrical, the activism focused on integrating
education, in the very broadest sense of that term, is no less ardent.
And higher education is the grass roots of the educational enterprise.
College and university teachers shape the communal knowledge base that
is disseminated from kindergarten through the university. Activist
academic practices include exposing the workings of oppression,
constructing a tradition of disability culture, historical and textual
retrieval, canon reformation, finding and being role models, mentoring,
curriculum reform, course and program development, and integrating
disability into existing syllabi.

Part of the activism inherent in Feminist Disability Studies
emerges in its commitment to study the lives and artistic products of
women with disabilities. To analyze who disabled women are and what they
create expands our understanding of human variation and enriches our
collective knowledge of humankind, especially the ways that gender
operates. For example, the judgment that the disabled woman's body
is asexual and unfeminine creates what Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch
term "rolelessness," a social invisibility and cancellation of
femininity that can prompt disabled women to claim the female identity
that the culture denies them. Cheryl Marie Wade insists upon a harmony
between her disability and her womanly sexuality in a poem
characterizing herself as "The Woman With Juice." (37)

As Mairs' exploration of self-naming and Wade's assertion
of sexuality suggest, a feminist disability politics would uphold the
right of women to define their physical differences and their femininity
for themselves rather than conforming to received interpretations of
their bodies. Wade's poem of self-definition echoes Mairs by
maintaining firmly that she is "not one of the physically
challenged." Rather, she claims, "I'm the Gimp/l'm
the Cripple/I'm the Crazy Lady." Affirming her body as at once
sexual and different, she asserts, "I'm a French kiss with
cleft tongue." Resisting the cultural tendency not only to erase
her sexuality but to deprecate and objectify her body, she characterizes
herself as "a sock in the eye with gnarled fist." This image
of the disabled body as a visual assault, a shocking spectacle to the
nondisabled eye, captures a defining aspect of disabled experience.

Whereas feminists claim that women are objects of the evaluative
male gaze, Wade's image of her body as "a sock in the
eye" subtly reminds us that the disabled body is the object of the
stare. If the male gaze makes the normative female a sexual spectacle,
then the stare sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle.
The stare is the gaze intensified, framing her body as an icon of
deviance. Indeed, as Wade's poem suggests, the stare is the gesture
that creates disability as an oppressive social relationship. And as
every person with a visible disability knows intimately, managing,
deflecting, resisting, or renouncing that stare is part of the daily
business of life.

One example of academic activism that is exemplary in Feminist
Disability Studies is what might be called a methodology of intellectual
tolerance. This is not tolerance in the more usual sense of tolerating
each other -- although that would be useful as well. Rather, it is the
intellectual position of tolerating what has previously been thought of
as incoherence.

As feminism has embraced the paradoxes that have emerged from its
challenge to the gender system, it has not collapsed into chaos, but
rather has developed a methodology that tolerates internal conflict and
contradiction. This method asks difficult questions but accepts
provisional answers. This method recognizes the power of identity at the
same time that it reveals identity as a fiction. This method both seeks
equality and claims difference. This method allows us to teach with
authority at the same time that we reject notions of pedagogical mastery. This method establishes institutional presences even while it
acknowledges the limitations of institutions. This method validates the
personal but implements disinterested inquiry. This method writes new
stories and recovers traditional ones.

Considering disability as a vector of identity that intersects
gender is one more internal challenge. While it threatens the coherence
of the category "woman," Women's Studies can accommodate
such complication and the contradictions it creates. Indeed, Feminist
Disability Studies strengthens the critique that is feminism and deepens
the critique that is Disability Studies.

Feminist Disability Studies contends that integrating the study of
disability - as a category of analysis, as a historical community, as a
set of material practices, and as a representational system - into
gender studies and all educational enterprises will help integrate the
sociopolitical world for the benefit of everyone.

Disability, like gender and race, is everywhere, once we know how
to look for it. Integrating it will enrich and deepen all our teaching
and scholarship to include, for example, the history of the vibrant and
variegated disability rights and independent living movements into
studies of other social justice movements. Ethics is a disability issue,
as is the feminist ethic of care. Literature, art, and music also have
been shaped by disability experience - from Oedipus to Audre Lorde, from
Rembrandt to Toulouse-Lautrec to Frida Kahlo, from Beethoven to Stevie
Wonder. Many of our most developed historical fields, such as
women's, labor and immigration history, are deeply informed by
disability.

As with gender, race, and sexuality, to understand how disability
operates is to understand what it is to be fully human.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Graduate Associate Professor of
English at Howard University in Washington, DC, specializing in American
literature, feminist theory, and disability studies. She is the author
of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American
Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 1997), the editor of
Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York
University Press, 1996) and co-editor of Enabling the Humanities: A
Sourcebook for Disability Studies in Language and Literature (Modern
Language Association Press, 2001).

In 2000, Garland-Thomson co-directed the first National Endowment
for the Humanities Summer Institute for Disability Studies in the
Humanities. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the American Association
of University Women, for example. Her essay on Toni Morrison won the
1989 Modern Language Association's Florence Howe Award for Feminist
Scholarship.

She currently is writing a book on the dynamics of staring and one
on the cultural logic of euthanasia.

Garland-Thomson serves on the Research Advisory Board of the Center
for Women Policy Studies.

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